Saturday, February 19, 2011

Sundaze 1008

Hello, i wondered what to post because i didn't want to distract you all from all that great Cabaret Voltaire music i posted these last days. But then, this is how it goes, everything in our existance is fleeting, holding on just leads to mental disease. Have to mention here my first big disappointment with my new phone, those silly Koreans put in 4! different videoformats, but just 2 for music aac appleshit and the ancient mp3 format. I had hoped that, as so many mp3 players do that don't mention but still play the ogg format,it would play ogg.. alas no such luck..duh Well to be honest i do have some 40 gig of mp3's but having to encode good music in an inferior format hmm, i did grab the latest Radiohead in mp3 20 earlier although i already scored it in flac last night--check the link in comments--such trifling problems hmm, back to Sundaze and there's 2 sides of the tripping kind here today space-gaze-guitar and the XTC floaters who actually put some serious thought into what they were doing..just read the liner notes..

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All of the music on this album was actually written by three people under different aliases: Kim Casone, Don Falcone and Paul Neyrinck.

We trace our deepest reactions to the ambient sound around us through non-invasive imaging. Highlighting the blood, so it can be seen in the brain at the moment of listening, we can study the patterns that emerge over time. Patterns formed during a single listening experience (e.g., a song) can be considered a "map" to understanding our aural sensors. By placing various maps side by side, we discover similar maps, similar reactions. This repetition may suggest a plural intelligence within each of us, or the revelation of past lives, or astrological potentials, or simply a like moment in time of which we are an integral part.

In this spirit exists Spice Barons, Patternclear, Satellite IV, etc., combining natural and electronic sounds so that they make a perfect sense. All that we are emanates from the same seed. But how the flower is picked and assimilated remains random. In listening to the ambience that surrounds us, there is always the potential for individualized impressions which are constantly redefining the ambience. This occurs when an aural composition moves further and further from the maps formed by its initial listeners (i.e., its godly or human creators). For better or worse, our ambience will float away from us, toward the plural you - in enough directions to keep it eternally unidentified. (Don Falcone)

Formed in Bristol, England in 1993, the elusive avant-noise project Flying Saucer Attack primarily comprised the duo of singers/guitarists David Pearce and Rachel Brook, who formed FSA as an outlet for their interest in home-recording experimentation. There must be something about the landscape around Bristol, England, that incites its denizens to travel ever deeper inward in order to find inspiration for their art. Not at all dissimilar to the contemporaneous trip-hop scene that flourishes at its doorstep, Flying Saucer Attack creates a trance-like, decidedly cerebral sound — albeit without the vaguest insinuation of danceability. There's an eerie, elusive bliss in the collaborations between home-recording wizards Rachel Brook and David Pearce — kind of like an elongation of that sensorily unbound moment when wakefulness is about to give way to sleep.

The duo's self-titled debut is an amorphous compendium of loopy (literally) sonic explorations, dense and feedback-studded one moment, rapturously pastoral the next. Unfortunately, there's not nearly enough of the latter element (other than a transfiguring number called "Popol Vuh 1," which bears a passing spiritual resemblance to the prog-rock band of the same name) to merit more than a cursory listen. After 1994's Distance, a collection of atmospheric singles and unreleased material, FSA emerged in 1995 with Further, a remarkably evocative work which transported the group's hypnotic guitar wash into a uniquely pastoral setting. Chorus, another singles compilation, followed later in the year, and with it came a declaration of the end of the group's initial phase, setting the stage for Flying Saucer Attack's continued evolution as one of the decade's most innovative and ambitious groups. 1997's New Lands was the first fruit of this new FSA, now a Pearce solo project exploring the possibilities of sampling; Brook, meanwhile, focused on her side group Movietone, a similarly blissed-out excursion into sound. FSA followed up New Lands three years later with Mirror

No guitarist working within the psychedelic spectrum during the 1990's pushed tuneful feedback to its limits as heavily as Dave Pearce, to the point where it sounded as if he was channeling the ever-present background static coursing from the most infinite points of the universe. Sure, there were moments (primarily on their second full-length release "Further") where Pearce straps on an acoustic guitar to pluck and strum wistful, meditative passages to complement that vastness, but his use of the most heavily warped setting of distortion and digital echo captured a sound that was immediately identifiable as "Flying Saucer Attack". On several tracks on "Chorus", his second collection of singles, that sound is extended and refined even further than on previous full-length releases ("FSA", and "Further") and singles collection ("Distance"). An inner sleeve note cautions that Chorus "marks the end of FSA phase one...